


Rewritten

by fikgirl



Category: Stargate SG-1, The Tomorrow People (1992)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-08-30
Updated: 2010-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fikgirl/pseuds/fikgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. Jack O'Neill's clone is leading a calm, quiet life as a high school student. Some things are just too good to last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rewritten

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally published (and unfinished) years ago under the title of "Transient Reality." I've revived it, but unfortunately it's currently part of a Big Bang Challenge. The challenge goes until May 20th, and the story will be posted after that time. Once the challenge is completed, the story - in its entirety - will be uploaded here.

 

_Another detention, Jake? Is this some sort of plea for attention? _Jacob O’Neill heard a voice that sounded suspiciously like one Dr. Daniel Jackson chiding him as he handed the detention slip to Mr. Wilson. __

Mr. Wilson glanced at it and gave Jake a disappointed shake of his head. “Have a seat Mr. O’Neill.”

“Yes, sir.” Jake knew that he earned this detention and belonged here. Physical alterations, were not tolerated at Mountain Springs High School. Even if the golden boy of football glory brought it upon himself because he didn’t seem to understand that cornering and “coping a feel” on an uninterested female was unacceptable. Justification for his actions, if he’d chosen to share it with Vice Principal Morgan -- which Jake hadn’t -- didn’t get him out of the detention anymore than it saved Cameron “The Caminator” Turner. Still, if he had to serve detention there were worse teachers to serve time with than Mr. Wilson.

All detentions were not created equal. For that, Jake was grateful. Mr. Wilson was strict but fair. Unlike other teachers who saw detention as an opportunity to humiliate and serve menial tasks upon the students, Wilson took a more pragmatic approach. The science teacher believed that if students were going to be there, they may as well be academically productive. If they didn’t have homework assignments of their own, Wilson produced academic materials certain to challenge even the dimmest mind. Given the quality of over seventy-five percent of those who regularly landed detention, Jake figured that was a good thing.

Good or not, _Pride and Prejudice_ was no more interesting the second time around than it had been on the first reading more than thirty years ago. Glancing up from the book, Jake checked the clock on the wall before his eyes performed a slow circuit of the detention classroom. Mr. Wilson met his roving gaze with raised eyebrows from behind wire-framed lenses and the pseudo-senior returned his attention to Jane Austen’s lamentations. As he tried to summon up the motivation to finish this week’s reading assignment, Jake once again questioned the logic behind returning to high school.

Two years ago, the words sounded brave and macho. That was when Jake thought it would be easier to just assimilate into the life of high school sophomore and do it all again. That had been when he thought it would be easier to leave his old life (Jack O’Neill’s life, the one that wasn’t really Jake’s) behind and forget it all. Truth be told, it had been fun and entertaining until Jake realized that teenagers were still teenagers. No matter how young Jake looked, mentally he was old enough to be the father (or grandfather if he were being completely honest) to the ego-driven, self-absorbed pockets of wasted space that surrounded him everyday.

Graduation could not come soon enough.

_Funny, I felt that way the first time around too. _

The minutes ticked by as the hour assigned to detention crawled towards its end. Unable to focus on the plight of Elizabeth Bennett, Jake turned his attention to his calculus assignment. It was a mostly futile effort to not allow his thoughts to wander; they so often did when he didn’t make an effort to distract himself. There were things that he simply didn’t want to think about. Of course the best way to think about things was to try to _not _think about them.

The equation on the page blurred and reformed in his mind’s eye. The white page became a chalkboard with a slender, attractive blonde puzzling over the equations written there. Jake could just hear her voice if he let himself go enough, even though in his heart he knew that they weren’t his memories. These weren’t things that Jake experienced, but the echoes of another man’s life. It wasn’t as hard to deal with as it had been in those early days. Jake had his own life here and was making his own way, but some days the memories were a real bitch.

The sudden whirlwind of commotion around him jerked Jake from his thoughts. His attention immediately went to the clock as his peripheral awareness parsed the commotion around him. Students stood, gathering books, sliding out of desks, going from somber to boisterous in the blink of an eye. Jake moved to follow their example but froze in mid-motion.

His eyes fell to his Calculus notebook. Pinned there, he could only stare at what was most certainly not a mathematical equation or solution. Sketched out in quick but fine detail was a tall spire with a bulbous tip on the end of it. It stood against the backdrop of a sand dune. Poking out of beach sand and surrounded here and there by bits of beach grass and scrub, and a single lone palm tree, the lonely spire managed to simultaneously stand apart from its surroundings yet be an integral part of them.

Jake stopped his fingers before they could trace the outlines of the picture he sketched when his mind was a million miles away.

_Screw that. _Jake ripped the page out of the notebook. He crumbled up the drawing with one hand and slammed the notebook shut with the other. _Bad enough I’m dreaming about it. Not gonna start daydreaming about it too. _

He crammed the notebook into his backpack maybe a little too roughly and after a brief moment of consideration, Jake shoved the crumpled up drawing in as well. He knew it was a reason -- the dreams, not the drawing -- to call in and tell Landry what was going on. The thing was, Jake really didn’t want to know. Part of walking away from Jack’s life meant not having to deal with this crap.

_Yeah, Jake buddy, you just keep telling yourself that. _Jake bled into the flow of detention students freed from the afternoon’s session, the sketch a burning weight in his backpack. He was within inches of clearing the threshold when Mr. Wilson’s voice rang out behind him.__

“Jake could you stay a moment?”

_Nope. Not really. Don’t want to. _Jake didn’t say any of those things. Instead, with an internal curse, he turned to face the teacher. His voice oozed with good old teenage nonchalance. “Sure, Mr. Wilson, what’s up?”__

If Jake's flippant answer fazed the older man, Mr. Wilson did not show it. He simply waved towards an empty desk at the front of the classroom, "Have a seat please."

This, Jake knew, was not an auspicious beginning. In fact, in his experience -- both in the military and now with high school redux -- any conversation that began with the preface of “Have a seat, please” or any variant thereof did not bode well for the person being invited to have said seat. Given whom Jake was speaking with, that probably went doubly so.

“Um, River’s waiting for me.” Lamest excuse ever. River was one of the two high school students with whom Jake had actually formed something of a friendship despite the age difference. “I’m giving him a ride home.”

“I’m sure River will wait. This will only take a few minutes.”

Jake performed a quick threat and damage assessment in his head. The problem with falling in with River Warren was that by default that somehow put Jake more on Mr. Wilson’s radar than other students. The man was something of a “family friend,” as River explained it once with a casual disinterested shrug. (Which, Jake privately thought, really had to suck to have a close family friend looking over your shoulder in high school.) But Mr. Wilson hadn’t turned out to be the heavy-handed guardian type, nor was he the smarmy everybody’s-best-friend type. He was one of the few teachers -- one of the few adults -- who seemed to sense that there was a little more to Jake than met the eye and didn’t treat him like any other old high school student. More often than not, Mr. Wilson treated him with the respect of an equal and didn’t look down his nose at the “immature high school kid.”

Jake would never, ever in a million years admit it aloud but the attitude was a welcome -- and needed -- addition to his life. Few of the teachers or authority figures commanded Jake’s mutual respect; he always remembered that he was older and wiser and wondered if they were truly in touch with what was going on around them. Which meant that as odd as it was, Mr. Wilson was the one teacher that Jake really didn’t want to disappoint.

_I’ve stared down squads of Jaffa, and I’d rather do that then get The Lecture from Wilson. _

“Look, Mr. Wilson, I know I screwed up today,” Jake began in earnest, hoping to cut the older/younger man off at the pass. “But you have to believe me when I say that it wasn’t entirely my fault. Turner and I had a disagreement about respecting physical boundaries --”

“I believe you, Jake.” The words were soft, the precise and clipped British accent somehow understanding. Mr. Wilson slipped into a vacant student desk and indicated the one next to him with his hand, "Now, sit down."

Jake obeyed the order before he even thought about it. He blinked the moment he realized that he was in the seat and shook his head. It was the one thing about Mr. Wilson; somehow he always managed to say just the right words in just the right tone to get the students to listen to him. More than likely that was the reason that the high school students hadn't eaten him alive yet. "So, if you believe me --"

"You're correct. You screwed up," Mr. Wilson paused and held up a hand to forestall any objection or outburst that Jake might make, "All I want to know is: what is going on with you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." It wasn't a teenage excuse or a lie. Jake could honestly say he was completely confused.

Mr. Wilson removed his glasses and leaned forward, blue eyes holding Jake's gaze and daring him to look away. It was eerie because Jake had the fleeting thought that Mr. Wilson was not looking at him, but rather was looking through him.  "When the school year first started, you were doing amazingly well. You stayed out of trouble and out harm's way. You, wisely, avoided the football players. You even stood down in physical education classes when they tried to call you out.

"Now, suddenly it's as though you're a different person. In less than three weeks, you've been a party to five different altercations, each of them escalating into a bit more physical brutality each time. Is there some reason you're trying to get expelled?"

"Expelled? What? No!" Jake jerked upright, the words tumbling out in a mad sputtering. He wondered if he sounded as stupid as he thought he did and then realized that at least it probably meant he sounded like a typical eighteen year old. Although he wasn't particularly certain if that was a good or bad thing in this instance. "Is that you what think? That I'm trying to get kicked out of school? It's my senior year, where else would I go?"

"Then what?"

"I don't know. Maybe a few too many knocks to the head made a few of the gorillas on the football team smarter. It could happen."

"Jake --"

"It could."

"Jake --"

"Wrong place, wrong time. I don't know, Mr. Wilson, what do you want me to say? I can sure as hell tell you that I am unequivocally not trying to get expelled." Jake paused, realized what he said, and belated added, more out of habit than anything else, "Sir."

"Unequivocally." Mr. Wilson repeated. He stared at Jake for a moment, then the corners of his mouth slowly turned up. "You've just proven the point that I was going to try and make, so thank you."

Again, Jake felt that familiar sense of 'what the hell did I miss' déjà vu. Unfortunately, the only thing that came out of his mouth this time was, "Huh?"

"Have you ever considered applying for early graduation, Jake?"

"Sir?" Jake said it and kicked himself mentally. He was starting to sound like a fifty year old colonel and not an eighteen-year-old high school senior.

"You are one of the top students in the school. Your grades are all top notch, with the exception of history and that could be taken care of with a little tutoring. You could easily test out of all your required subjects. You would be free to stop coming to school everyday and you wouldn't have to risk expulsion."

"Yeah, but then I'd be bored. And hey, graduation and prom, those are the highlights of high school, right? I wouldn't want to miss those."

"I'm sure we could get you special dispensation." _You’re too smart for your own good, you just don’t realize it yet._

"I'm really not that smart, Mr. Wilson. I just have good study partners. Katie's a math whiz you know? And River? The boy absorbs English and history like a sponge." Jake wondered, for not the first time, if maybe Loki, the Asgard version of Dr. Moreau, hadn't scrambled his brain when he cloned him from Jack O'Neill. After all, why else was he putting up such an argument about this? Mr. Wilson was handing him a 'get out of high school free card' and he wanted to put it back in the deck and shuffle again.

No way could he be getting attached to all the trappings of high school and adolescence. His friends maybe, but the rest of it, Jake was absolutely positive he could do without. Who needed more than one prom and graduation anyway?

Then why was he suddenly breaking into a cold sweat and wishing he were staring down a Goa'uld instead of sitting in the classroom having this conversation with a high school physics teacher?

"You used the word unequivocally in a conversation," Mr. Wilson pointed out. "Not too many 'not that smart,' eighteen-year-olds would do that."

Jake took a deep breath and blew it out. "Is it really that bad?"

"It could be, if you're not careful. Considering how many times we've talked about more non-violent approaches to these -- encounters -- you don't seem to be taking my advice to heart, Jake. It's just a matter of time before there won't be an eyewitness to state that you _unequivocally _did not start the altercation. And there is only so much I can do as an advocate for you. Eventually, this is going to escalate beyond a detention. Then, what will you do?"

 

 


End file.
